Suit of armour

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”  Stephen Hawking

“Don’t underestimate me because I’m quiet. I know more than I say, think more than I speak and observe more than you know.”  Michaela Chung

“Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose, larger than the self kind of understanding.” Bill Bullard

 

Suit of armour

 

Hard to believe

She choses to wear her

Hair as though the wind

Has had its way

 

Who would want

To dress so casual

Borderline slovenly

As if it is a uniform

Others cast aside

 

 

Her shoes, worn

No, pathetic

So out of date

Lacking style, fashion unconscious

 

If you even notice her

She is off in a corner

Back to any available wall

Book, journal, alone 

 

Sometimes she is joined by others

Pulled from her pages

She holds them in her gaze

Square on, silent

 

 

Nodding her head, offering a hand

Armed with hugs

A quiet word as needed

She holds up the mirror

Offers a different view

 

Her mask keeps frivolity at bay

But those in need

Always seem to find her

Even seek her out

 

 

And for them, she is there

Telling no tales

 

 

Bisous

Léa 

 

 

 

La flâneuse

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”    – Flannery O’Conner

 

“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.”   – William Blake

 

“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”   – Czeslaw Milosz

 

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La flâneuse

 

C’est moi –  la flâneuse ( le flâneur)

Moth eaten – béret noir

My imperial crown

Climbing, descending

Village to village

All about town

Meandering the streets,

Villages and cities of

La belle France

Like Walt Whitman

Declarations of poetry

Observations – running

Commentary of my

Scrutiny – meditations,

Entreaties, prayers, odes,

Declarations in verse

Poetry – my creed

*

If you look up the word today flâneuse – feminine of flâneur, the dictionary would give the word stroll. Yet recently I read a brief passage describing 19th century poets in Paris as a flâneur – one who strolled about the streets of Paris crying out in verse much as the American poet, Walt Whitman was known to do on the streets of Manhattan.

Bisous,

Léa